Winter? What Winter?

If Season Is Ending, When Did It Begin?

Winter officially comes to an end at 9:14 tonight. In much of the nation, it never seemed to get started.

In Hampton Roads, the lack of snow made it seem less like winter and more like some sort of characterless lull between last fall and the coming spring.

But here, as in most of the nation, the thermometer told the tale. The figures are out, and officials say the winter of 1994-95 was the third-mildest of the past 100 years.

It wasn't just a quirk of fate. Hampton Roads breezed through the winter because of a powerful climatic anomaly known as El Nino.

The name is Spanish for "the child," conjuring images of gentle winds and sunny skies. But although it produced such conditions over Virginia and much of the United States this winter, El Nino belies its name. It is the single most powerful weather event on Earth.

During the 1982-83 El Nino, huge drought-related fires took place in Australia and Borneo, sea bird populations dropped on Pacific islands and rains flooded the Rocky Mountain region of the United States. In the winter of 1991-92, El Nino caused widespread droughts in southeastern Africa and created a famine that affected 20 million people.

And this year, while Virginia and much of the rest of the country enjoyed a respite from the typical ravages of winter, California was being inundated with torrential rains in January and early March - rains that should have been pelting Hawaii - that have caused billions of dollars in damage.

Other factors also contributed to the climatic changes. The 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide gas molecules that Mt. Pinatubo spewed into the air in 1991 have largely settled.

The gases, which ultimately turned into sulfuric acid, deflected 2 percent of the sun's light, causing the Earth's temperature to drop an average of 1 degree Fahrenheit for the past three years.

Some scientists believe the settling of those sulfuric acid particles has allowed a renewal of the global warming effect of gases such as carbon dioxide that trap the sun's rays after they reflect off the Earth's surface. By doing so, they say, the carbon dioxide level effectively raises the Earth's average temperature, which contributed to the mild winter.

But, said Jim Wagner, senior forecaster with the National Weather Service's Climate Analysis Center, "the only cause that we can really put our fingers on - and it may not have been the total explanation - was El Nino."

Others agree, citing the characteristic warmth and West Coast precipitation. "Overall, it was a typical El Nino winter," said Hugh Cobb, science operations officer with the National Weather Service in Wakefield, Va.

"There is a linkage between El Nino years and warmer weather. Everything is interconnected on a global sense, weatherwise."

It was certainly warmer in Hampton Roads. While temperatures and precipitation in the Southeast as a whole remained average, according to figures supplied by the National Climatic Data Center, it was significantly warmer than the norm in Hampton Roads.

National Weather Service figures show that December's average temperature was 50.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 6.5 degrees above the 30-year norm. In January, it was 6.2 degrees warmer than normal. In February, it was 0.8 degrees above the norm.

The utter lack of snow made it seem warmer, as well. Hampton Roads typically receives 8.9 inches of snow each winter. The measurable total this winter was zero.

Cobb says that was a bit of a fluke.

"The lack of snowfall was just due to the timing of systems," said Cobb. "When we had the cold air, we didn't have the moisture. And when we had the moisture, we didn't have the cold air."

Nearby communities received their share of snow, he noted. Up to 6 inches fell near Richmond Jan. 30. On Feb. 8, Elizabeth City, N.C., received 4 inches.

But overall, it wasn't exactly a monstrously cold winter. An unusual nor'easter just before Christmas and a brief cold spell in early February were the only weather events that harkened back to the region's fierce ice storms of early 1994.

Most scientist agree the mild winter can be largely attributed to the effects of El Nino and Mt. Pinatubo. More controversial is the assertion that the Pinatubo eruption temporarily slowed the overall trend of global warming.

"I think we're heading back into global warming, and I think we had a respite for a few years because of Pinatubo," said William B. Grant, senior research scientist in the atmospheric sciences division at NASA Langley Research Center.

"Every year in the late '80s was warmer than the year before," he said. "When Pinatubo erupted, from then until a year ago, we had late '80s weather."

Pinatubo, Grant said, released more gases and particulate matter into the atmosphere than any event since the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, in Indonesia. Pinatubo, said Grant, "reflected solar radiation, and second, it affected the stratospheric dynamics, which means stratospheric air motion. That in turn affects the jet stream, and that in turn affects the weather."